Many of the treats associated with the holiday season—from roast turkeys to hot chocolate—had not been tasted outside of the Americas before the early 1500s. In the new exhibition Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture, a walk-through diorama depicts a bustling food market, set in the year 1519 in the capital city of the Aztec Empire, in what's now Mexico. The market featured domesticated turkeys for sale, among many other foods—including chocolate—from all over the empire.

The Tlatelolco market was vast and well organized, with rows of merchandise arranged in separate sections.

At the time diorama is set, Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés was about to enter the city for the first time, setting off an explosion of cultural exchange that would bring exciting new foods—including the birds we now associate with American Thanksgiving, as well as chocolate—to Europe, Asia, and Africa—and introduce others to the Americas.

A bustling food market set in the Aztec Empire in the early 1500s is depicted in a diorama in the new food exhibition Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture. Among the foods sold there were domesticated turkeys.

What were some other foods sold at the Aztec Market? Though wild game, turkeys, fish, frogs, salamanders, iguanas, insects, insect eggs, and larvae could all be found in the great marketplace of Tlatelolco, in what is now Mexico City, the majority of foods for sale were plant-based; they included chayote, chile peppers, maize, and squashes.

As for domesticated turkeys, starting in the early 1500s, explorers shipped them to Europe from North and Central America; especially in England, they quickly became a popular food for feast days, such as Christmas. But in Plymouth Colony in 1621, on the first official "Thanksgiving" celebrated there, English pilgrims didn't eat domesticated turkeys; according to documents from the time, they ate only wild fowl, perhaps including wild turkeys, but more likely wild ducks or geese.